


true companions

by mayfriend



Category: Dollhouse
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Rossum Wins, Boyd gets his family, Captivity, Gen, Multi, Post-Apocalypse, Spoilers for Season 2 Episode 11 on
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-14
Updated: 2018-08-14
Packaged: 2019-06-27 13:21:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15686247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mayfriend/pseuds/mayfriend
Summary: You’re here because you’re my family. I love you guys.Rossum wins, and Boyd gets to keep his family.





	true companions

**Author's Note:**

> I have so many WIPs to write, but do I write them? No, I do not. Instead, here we are yet again with me writing a fic for a show with a miniscule fandom (or at least, miniscule now, ten years after the show came out) because I fell in love with it.

He keeps them together. Families are meant to stay together, after all, even one as fucked up as this.

Once, Topher tries to make a game of it in one of his more lucid moments: “Adelle’s the mom, or _mum,_ and Tony and Priya are the kissing cousins… Echo’s the problem child, while I’m just a misunderstood genius… _oh shit,_ does this make Boyd our dad…?”

Topher’s lucid moments don’t last for long.

It’s a beautiful complex, all shining floors and silver fittings. They each have their own rooms, although only half of them are ever slept in at once. Priya and Tony bunk together, and sometimes Echo joins them. Sometimes she winds her way into Topher’s den of insanity, when Adelle isn’t there to stop her. 

It is a gilded cage, and it’s better than the rest of the world gets, but god, it's terrible.

Once, the view from fifty stories up would have been breathtaking, and in a way it still is; where before Los Angeles was all palm trees and skyscrapers, it’s become a burnt out husk that you never quite get used to. Those first few terrible days people had run around like ants below them and they could do nothing but watch. Each day, there was less and less movement, until all that remained of the city were corpses and butchers.

“We were meant to save the world,” Echo - or is it Caroline, or one of the other forty-something people living in her head - sobs as she stares down at the chaos, the death, the destruction. _“I_ was meant to save the world.”

Adelle, now more a nursemaid than anything else, hushes her. “You saved us,” she says as she tries to comfort her, a useless endeavour but all she's capable of, “that’s something.”

Yeah, it’s something alright. Something.

They will never become the victims of butchers or butchers themselves; never be wiped into dumbshows or imprinted with another person’s personality (at least- at least- no _more._ They are what they are what they are, and nothing will change that, not anymore). Boyd loves them too much for that. He loves them so much that he put them here, waited on hand and foot by those programmed to serve to their every need, to protect them from themselves (at least, after they found Topher with slit wrists), and makes them watch what he did- what _they_ did to the rest of humanity.

At first, he barely came by, so busy with the end of times. Now he has more and more time on his hands; The End has come and he decides he wants to spend whatever comes next with them; his chosen family _,_ his true companions, they who never asked to be chosen.  At first, it was easy to scream at him, rage at him, curse. At first, it seemed that his fantasies of his happy family were truly those of a mad man, that nothing would ever change them, that, _this_. But forever is a very long time, and that is what they have now, Boyd promises (and they all know he keeps his promises). Forever. As soon as their bodies begin to wear and tear, begin to crumble, Boyd will get them new ones. They will be like this, as they are, forever.

No matter how hard you try, it’s impossible to be angry forever.

Now, they are tired. It helps that there’s hardly any killings out in the open anymore. The survivors down on the ground are too smart for that. Anthony, who knows better than any of them what it is to hide from people who want your head, tells them most of them will have gone underground - away from the Butchers who roam the streets, away from signals which might wipe them clean.

“Who knows?” he says, his voice strained, “Maybe they’ll find our old dollhouse.”

Boyd is visibly pleased each time he visits and finds them less hopeful, less enraged, less human, more his. He reminds Echo of Alpha just before he rammed her head full of all the personalities she’d ever had, as he ranted that they were gods and goddesses, ascended beings. A genius, a monster, in love with an idea. Alpha’s icon had been Echo herself; Boyd’s shrine is dedicated to the idea of them, a family, together forever.

“So what, you grew up in a broken home?” Priya spat at him at one of his infernal family dinners, the table almost creaking under the weight of all the splendour whilst people starved to death in the city below, “You never had a mother to love you or a father to raise you? Never had siblings to snap at or kids of your own? You think that justifies _this?”_

Boyd had barely even blinked. He just watched her until she broke down into tiny pieces, sobbing on the floor as Tony tried to hold her together with his arms alone. “This is natural selection, Priya,” he told her, voice measured and not without warmth, “this is how it has always been. The strongest survive.”

That is the worst part, they all agree on that. That he still manages to sound so caring, trick their ears into thinking that he is still the Boyd they knew and loved and trusted- but that man had never existed at all.

Years pass, and he adds to their little tribe of lost children. One day Whiskey appears, her eyes still full of intense and not-entirely-sane love as she looks at Boyd. It is like it was with Priya and Tony; it stuck, deep down, and nothing they say will convince her that he is a monster. She never becomes Claire again, and Topher won’t ever admit it but he’s grateful - Claire shot Bennett, and she knew him, the real him, and she _hated._

Nobody else here hated him, at least not enough to show it. They’re all far too weary for that kind of emotion.

Next comes Ivy - they’d been sure she was dead, after the world went to hell. Topher had cried and cried that although he’d tried to save her he’d just sent her to her death. But against all the odds, she’s survived - she’s harder and sharper and her fury drags them out of their complacency for a while. She tells them of stories she’s heard, of resistances across the country trying to find a way to reverse the wipes, to return everyone to who they used to be. She saws down one of the table legs into a stake, but doesn’t get a chance to use it. She’s so angry, and so raw, and she is the only one except Adelle who can make it through a night alone, although Adelle hasn’t slept alone in years.

She has a tattoo on her back - _MY NAME IS IVY LAPIRA -_ and tries to give them ones as well with ink cartridges and a needle from a sewing kit. Stick and poke, she calls it, and Tony, Adelle and Priya take her up on her offer. Echo says that she isn’t Caroline anymore. Topher doesn’t care who he is. Whiskey doesn’t understand the proposition, and none of them know her original name anyway. “We might not be in any danger of being wiped and imprinted anymore,” Ivy says as she carefully sterilises the needles, “but it’s still worth having the reminder. And we’ll need them when we escape.”

 _When,_ she says, not _if._ She wasn’t there at the beginning when they launched madcap plan after plan, when they got knocked back every time. She wasn’t there to see how Priya wept at the thought of being a prisoner again, when Echo punched herself bloody against the windows and got nothing for it but broken knuckles, when Topher almost blew himself up trying to reverse his work.

That last one got them a visit from Boyd. _I’m not mad,_ his whole demeanour had said, _just disappointed._ After that, they got cut off from any technology besides boomboxes and game consoles. Every so often they screeched with static, and they all knew that was meant to wipe them, turn them into butchers. They all half wished it did.

(Is it better to pick up the phone or not?)

Ivy has to fail on her own. Has to struggle to wake up Whiskey and find only adoration for Boyd and contentment for the state of affairs. Ivy has to choke down the five course dinners and try and lunge at Boyd with a steak knife and knock herself out trying to trip the alarms by herself. Watching her, they all remember why they gave up, and when she is as dried up as they are, Adelle is there to make her a hot cup of her awful green tea that Boyd still manages to import for her and hold her as she cries.

At seventy six, Adelle dies suddenly. Her heart was weak, although none of them knew. She was born before such things would be scanned for in babies, and she went through her whole life with a timer in her chest. It seems impossible that a woman whose heart had enough room for them all - in the end - couldn’t keep her alive. They cry, desperately, try and hold onto her body when the staff come in and take her away. 

The week after, Boyd walks in with an attractive, middle-aged English woman on his arm, who looks at them all with big eyes and a trembling chin. He beams, like he’s fixed something, when they’ve all been broken for so long.

“You’re Adelle but not Adelle,” Topher murmurs to their mother, the stranger, when he leaves, and she nods and says _I know._

"I'm the same inside," she says as she gives them all a tremulous smile, and none of them ask _what is the same?_  This Adelle is a brain scan from three days before she died. What is three days? What is a person, really? What are they now? What have they become?

Life goes on. That’s all it does for them anymore. One by one, they’ll sicken and die, and one by one, Boyd will replace them with shiny new versions of themselves to heal the hole in his heart he’ll never acknowledge exists.

Priya and Tony will get pregnant seven times, and they’ll abort each one in secret, promising each other they will never have a child to be bred in captivity. Echo will switch between her personalities just for something to do. Topher will slide further and further into insanity, and Adelle will do her best to catch him as he mumbles _I know what I know, I know what I know, I know what I know._ Whiskey will become a person, slowly, eventually, but she has no other lives to compare this one to, not like Echo did. She is built around a love for the Boyd Langton that never existed, and she is the one that he likes the best, perhaps for that very reason. She is the only one who sees their family as the only thing that matters in this new world, like him; unlike him, it is all she has ever known. Ivy will tattoo every inch of her skin with names and shapes of her old life - _stick and poke, stick and poke -_ and when she’s put in a new body she starts again until she’s left behind a trail of living works of art. And Boyd will look down on them all, content, or as content as a man like him is capable of being.

They stay together, because that’s what families do.

**Author's Note:**

> Seriously though... what the _fuck_ Boyd?
> 
> Find me on tumblr at: [mayfriend](http://mayfriend.tumblr.com)


End file.
